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Duplicate Content for Spanish & English Product

Our company provides training courses and I am looking to provide the Spanish version of a course that we already provide in English. As it is an e-commerce site, our landing page for the English version gives the full description of the course and all related details. Once the course is purchased, a flash based course launches within a player window and the student begins the course.

For the Spanish version of the course, my target customers are English speaking supervisors purchasing the course for their Spanish speaking workers. So the landing page will still be in English (just like the English version of the course) with the same basic description, with the only content differences on that page being the inclusion of the fact that this course is in Spanish and a few details around that.

The majority of the content on these two separate landing pages will be exactly the same, as the description for the overall course is the same, just that it's presented in a different language, so it needs to be 2 separate products.

My fear is that Google will read this as duplicate content and I will be penalized for it. Is this a possibility or will Google know why I set it up this way and not penalize me? If that is a possibility, how should I go about doing this correctly?

even though here in SEOmoz we are happy that Mozzers find occasions for collaborating with other people, we think that it would be better (and even safer for your inbox) to use the private message function.

You are going to have a problem with this.....Unfortunately, the combination of duplicate looking content and a directory/subdirectory structure causes sites to be stuck in Googles Panda filter. Google pulled out a "large roll of duct tape" to fix the problem with multiple language version websites, writing “hreflang” on one strip and writing“canonical” on the other strip.

Basically, Google is telling us that we should use a regional subtag in our head tag on each URL to help Google’s spider figure out what kind of content is on each page and where it is intended. Once this is done, Google will consider that the content is intended for that region. Here are the rules for hreflang and canonical....make sure you are sitting down......

Hreflang

The hreflang attribute (hreflang: rel="alternate" hreflang="x") rules in a nutshell:

Applies to any users from different parts of the world, with content translated in the native language to target that region.

Used for multilingual websites using substantially the same content on all web pages (e.g., English pages for Australia, Canada, and the U.S.)

Can specify the language, country, and URLs of content translated for multiple countries.

Used when:

You translate only the template of your page (navigation and footer) and main content is still in a single language.

Pages have broadly similar content within a single language, but are targeted at different regions (e.g., English-language content targeted in U.S., UK, and Australia).

Content on the web page is fully translated (e.g., have Spanish, French, and English versions of each page).

How to use rel="alternate" hreflang ="x"

If there are multiple language versions of the website, each language must use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" (e.g., a page in Spanish must have a rel="alternate" hreflang="x" link to the English and French version and the English and French version must include a link pointing to the Spanish site.

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